climate_change__island_life_in_a_volatile_world

Climate change: island life in a volatile world

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Climate change: island life in a
volatile world

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About this free course
This OpenLearn course provides a sample of level 2 study in
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You can experience this free course as it was originally designed
on OpenLearn, the home of free learning from The Open
University – www.open.edu/openlearn/people-politicslaw/politics-policy-people/sociology/climate-change-islandlife-volatile-world/content-section-0
There you’ll also be able to track your progress via your activity
record, which you can use to demonstrate your learning.
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978-1-4730-1920-1 (.kdl)
978-1-4730-1152-6 (.epub)

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Contents
•

Introduction

•

Learning outcomes

•

1 Dividing the planet

•

2 Island territories, ocean flows
•

2.1 Issues of responsibility

•

2.2 Climate change in a globalised world

•

2.3 Divisions that matter: thinking through
territories

•

2.4 Worlds in motion: the importance of
flows

•

•

3 Settling islands
•

3.1 Voyages of discovery and settlement

•

3.2 Migrations of life

4 Volatile worlds
•

4.1 When climate changes

•

4.2 Shifting ground

•

4.3 Dilemmas of climate change

•

5 Conclusion

•

References

•

Acknowledgements

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Introduction
The course uses the example of climate change to highlight the
dynamic and volatile character of the planet, and how globalisation
links together, in often unequal ways, people and places across
the world. The course focuses on the potentially momentous
impact of global environmental change on Pacific Islands like
Tuvalu. It introduces students to geographical ways of thinking
about the world.
This OpenLearn course provides a sample of level 2 study in
Social Sciences.

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Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:
•

understand how the world is in the process of ‘being
made’, right down to the earth beneath our feet

•

consider how islands are shaped by a dynamic
relationship between territories and flows

•

show how human life is entangled with non-human
forces and processes in the making of today's
globalised world.

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1 Dividing the planet
A good globe can set you back quite a lot of money. Of course, I
don't mean the little moulded plastic planets or the globes you can
blow up as if the world were a beach ball, but the decent sized
ones that sit solidly on turned wooden bases and quietly emanate

authority from the corner of a room. Yet these days, it hardly
seems worthwhile making such an investment. Countries appear
to change their colour, their shape or their name with remarkable
rapidity.
It has become a cliché to point out that globes and maps that date
back to the middle of the last century and earlier featured vast
swathes coloured in pink or red to signify lands that belonged to
the British Empire. Not only has the British Empire broken up, but
over recent decades we have also seen the dissolution of the
Soviet Union into a number of new states. Other countries like
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia have split themselves
into two or more pieces. Meanwhile, in the western Pacific, a
cluster of islands that was once a British colony called the Gilbert
and Ellice Islands has become two republics: the Gilbert group are
now known as Kiribati, while the Ellice Islands are now Tuvalu.
How we divide the planet's surface up into recognisable units
reveals ongoing changes: territorial reshufflings that may render a
map or globe out of date before it has even left the production line.
More importantly, such transformations are often contentious and
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painfully wrought at the ‘ground level’ where people live, frequently
leaving some people unsettled or uncertain as to where they
belong. But amid all this relentless activity, it can be tempting to

think of the land masses themselves, the continents and the
islands, as maintaining the same shape, even as their names,
colours or subdivisions change.
While there may be some comfort in the idea that land endures
while all else changes, it is a rather dubious assumption. For
several decades it has been generally accepted in the earth
sciences that continents ‘drift’, usually at the rate of inches or
fractions of an inch each year. More recently, a growing body of
evidence suggests that much more rapid physical changes in the
surface of our planet are also beginning to take place. Since the
1980s, intensive research by climate scientists collaborating
internationally has built up a picture of the earth's weather systems
being transformed by human activities. These changes are often
referred to, in a kind of shorthand, as ‘global warming’.
The prospect of global climate change and what it might mean for
the way we experience and imagine our planet is the theme of this
course. As we will see, it is not easy to predict the extent or
severity of future changes in the world's climate, and it is just as
difficult to anticipate how people, organisations and nation states
will respond to these potentially changing conditions. Many climate
scientists are now predicting that a generalised warming now
under way will lead to gradually rising sea levels throughout this
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century. This would impact on coastlines around the world, but it
would have particularly serious implications for small islands or
atolls.
Within the span of a single lifetime, islands which now support
dense and vibrant populations could become too prone to climatic
extremes to remain habitable. Some low-lying coral islands might
even disappear completely beneath the surface of the sea.

Figure 1 Boy with model outrigger canoe, Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu

Activity 1
Turn now to Reading 1A by Mark Lynas (2003) entitled ‘At the end
of our weather’, which you will find attached below. Lynas, a
journalist, felt moved by personal evidence of changing climate to
seek out its impacts at ‘ground level’, and to give an impression of
what it is like to live through these changes. While you are reading,

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you might want to pause and think what it would feel like to lose
your whole country, never to be able to come back for a visit.
•

Do you think you would try to stay even if weather

events were potentially life-threatening?

•

If you chose to evacuate your country, where would
you go?

•

What would you try to take with you?

•

Would you want all your friends and family, or all your
compatriots to go to the same place?

Click to view Reading 1A. (2 pages, 0.08MB)
These are emotionally charged issues, and perhaps you are being
asked to think about things which are so life-changing as to be
almost unthinkable. However, these are also questions or
dilemmas that some people, including the islanders of Tuvalu,
have to live with in an everyday way. Steve Pile (2006) has written
about disturbing events in the past that come back to haunt people
in the present; the issue of climate change suggests that there are
possible future events that can ‘haunt’ us here and now

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Figure 2 Tuvalu's location in the Pacific Ocean

In this way, the phenomenon of climate change, and the possibility
of people displacement that it raises, impels us to think afresh
about the ground beneath our feet, and the air and sea around us.
It prompts us to question the permanence of what we may once
have taken to be stable and enduring. The changes that are now
being predicted are linked to patterns of energy use in the modern
world. Accelerating industrial growth over the last two and a half
centuries has relied predominantly on fossil fuels that release
carbon into the atmosphere, which scientific evidence suggests is
contributing to an enhanced greenhouse effect that is warming the
planet as a whole.

Defining the enhanced greenhouse effect
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The greenhouse effect is a natural part of the functioning of the
earth. It involves certain atmospheric gases (termed ‘greenhouse
gases’) absorbing solar energy which has previously passed

through the atmosphere and been reradiated back from the earth's
surface. This has the effect of keeping the planet many degrees
warmer than would otherwise be expected from the amount of
solar energy coming in. There is strong evidence that this natural
greenhouse effect is now being enhanced as a result of human
activity. Burning fossil fuels and other activities change the
composition of gases in the earth's atmosphere – adding
significantly more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide – which
results in an overall warming of the planet.
Recognising that industrial processes act cumulatively on climate
focuses attention firmly on human activity as a potent force acting
on the physical world. Indeed, some social theorists have argued
that human-induced climate change, along with other damaging
consequences of industrial activity on the environment, has now
eclipsed natural disasters as a source of popular concern and
anxiety (Beck, 1992).
However, amid this growing acknowledgement of the severity of
human-induced or anthropogenic environmental issues, we should
not forget that physical processes are highly variable, and
sometimes extremely volatile, even without human input. Recent
years have seen a number of sharp and shocking reminders of the
forcefulness of the natural world, including earthquakes in Kobe,
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Japan (1997), Bam, Iran (2003) and the underwater quake off the
island of Sumatra, Indonesia (2004) that triggered the devastating
tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

Figure 3a and 3b Satellite images of the northern shore of Banda Aceh,
Indonesia before and after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami
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View description - Figure 3a and 3b Satellite images of the
northern shore of Banda Aceh, Indonesia ...
Click to view a larger version of Figures 3a and 3b.
Events on the scale of the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami can
also alter the contours of land and sea – even more rapidly than
changes triggered by human activity. In the worst affected regions,
whole towns and villages were destroyed and, even after the
surges had receded, areas of coastline remained transformed. You
may recall from news coverage that within days of the disaster in
2004, satellite photos taken before and after the event revealed
sudden, dramatic changes, as can be seen in Figures 3a and b.
Within a few weeks, images from satellites and other sources had
been compiled to produce a new atlas of the region which provided
topographic information of the transformations as well as
documenting the immediate social impacts of the disaster.
Human activities – such as clearing away mangroves that once

offered protection for coastlines – may have contributed to the
extent of the destruction caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami.
Nonetheless, the earthquake itself, and the waves it triggered, was
a natural event caused by shifts in the earth's crust that remain
beyond human influence.
This course starts by looking at the issue of human-induced
change in global climate and its potential social impacts, but we
will see that this issue soon draws our attention to ongoing
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changes in the world that are not directly attributable to human
action. Concern with the human making and remaking of the world
inevitably draws us to consider those other processes and events
that have shaped our planet – and will continue to shape it in the
future.
As Lynas's (2003) account (see Reading 1A) of the predicament of
Tuvalu makes clear, the climate change issue raises questions
about which particular groups or sectors of humanity have had the
most impact, and which groups are most likely to suffer the worst
consequences. Section 2 of this course looks at the way that
climate change as a global process implicates people who are
literally oceans apart. It introduces the notion of ‘territory’ as a way
of coming to a clearer understanding of what is under threat when
we talk about serious changes in the world, and why people feel so

strongly about threats to the places they live. Yet the very idea that
one part of the globe can be affected by activities elsewhere on the
planet also suggests that territories are connected in some way.
This section also introduces the idea of ‘flows’ that move through
and between territories, connecting them to the world beyond.
Thinking through territories and flows helps us to build up a sense
of the different forces that come together to make and remake the
world. In particular, it offers us a way of looking at both human and
non-human forces, and how they work together. In Section 3, we
will consider the long and rich story of human involvement in the
making of islands, including the often awe-inspiring journeys that
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island settlers have undertaken to arrive at their new homelands
far out in the ocean. Humans, however, are not alone in settling
islands, and they are rarely, if ever, the first to arrive. Therefore, in
this section we will also examine the other forms of life that make
their way to islands, and their contribution to island territories.
Section 4 continues the theme of the importance of non-human
forces in the shaping of islands, this time looking beyond the
movements of human beings and other forms of life to the shifts
and changes that take place in the earth itself and in the sea and
sky around us.
We delve beneath the issue of human-induced climate change,

and its impact on low-lying islands like Tuvalu, in order to explore
the long and profound entanglement of humans and non-human
forces in the making of the world. Moreover, we begin to ponder
what this entanglement might mean when addressing problems
like climate change – urgent and far-reaching problems that call
out for some response.

Course aims
•

To explore how the world around us shifts and
changes right down to the earth beneath our feet.

•

To consider the way that islands are shaped by a
dynamic interplay of territories and flows.

•

To explore the inevitable entanglement of human life
with non-human forces and processes.

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2 Island territories, ocean flows
2.1 Issues of responsibility
The aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami saw an
unprecedented aid effort to assist the affected regions. In the early
days after the disaster, pledges of financial assistance from
overseas governments were often outstripped by the generosity of
their own populaces. This was a case when ordinary people
around the world saw and were moved by the tragic circumstances
of others far away (Rose, 2006), and they responded with gifts of
money and provisions, and even with offers of their own skills or
labour.
There has yet to be a crisis of this magnitude that has been pinned
to anthropogenic climate change, though warnings of large-scale
catastrophes from scientists and activists now abound. In contrast
to natural disasters, however, climate change raises the issue of a
different sort of responsibility: an obligation to others that arises not
simply out of an upwelling of sympathy, but out of a feeling of
being implicated in the lives of island peoples and the predicament
in which they find themselves.
Iris Marion Young (2003) has written of a kind of responsibility that
comes about when we recognise that we are connected by our
own actions to the suffering or injustice experienced by others who
may live far away from us (see Allen, 2006). What concerns us in
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this section is the way in which these connections operate in a
case where the actions in question transform the physical world on
the global scale. To begin to grasp the issues of responsibility this
raises, we must also grapple with these transformations. As this
section will also argue, the concepts of territory and flow help us
make sense of how the world changes, offering an understanding
of events that might otherwise seem too vast, complex and chaotic
to pass into the realms of political consideration.

2.2 Climate change in a globalised
world
As you will recall from Reading 1A, the people of Tuvalu are now
arguing that larger and more affluent nations should take
responsibility for the climatic changes threatening their country. As
Paani Laupepa from the Tuvalu environment ministry put it: ‘We
are on the front line … through no fault of our own. The
industrialised countries caused the problem, but we are suffering
the consequences’ (Lynas, 2003). Before we look more closely at
this charge, and the scientific evidence that is being compiled to
support it, it is important to appreciate how the problems faced by
Tuvalu form part of a much larger issue that implicates other
countries or regions in different ways.

Activity 2
I would like you to turn to Reading 1B by Molly Conisbee and
Andrew Simms (2003) entitled ‘Environmental refugees: the case
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for recognition’, which you will find attached below. The aim of this
piece is to gain recognition for people displaced by what the
authors claim is accelerating environmental degradation. It
addresses the issue in a general sense, gathering evidence from
around the world.
As you are reading, note how often the terms ‘global’ or
‘international’ or some variants of these words appear.
•

What kind of relationships do you think the authors are
attempting to establish between distant places?

•

What kind of image of the world are the authors
seeking to convey?

Click to view Reading 1B (3 pages, 0.08MB).
Many claims are made in Reading 1B. You may have come across
similar pronouncements in news media reporting. There are quite a
lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘mights’ in the reading, and you should be mindful
that some of the arguments are hotly contested (as we will see
later in Section 4.3), although the references to Oxford University
analysts, world organisations and international panels of scientists

are intended to lend them a certain authority.
At the heart of Conisbee's and Simms's argument (2003) is a
sense that the planet is being transformed in its entirety by human
activity. The term ‘global’, as it prefixes the issue of climate
change, points to flows or interconnectivities that link people and
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places over vast distances. Like Paani Laupepa from the Tuvalu
environment ministry in Reading 1A, Conisbee and Simms make a
strong case for the argument that what some people do on one
side of the world has serious implications for the lives of others on
the other side of the world.
Human-induced climate change, then, is not simply a process that
takes place in a globalised world. It also helps bring the question of
what we mean by ‘globalised world’ into focus, adding a powerful
new dimension to the idea of an increasingly interconnected
planet. The issues revolving around climate change do more than
simply enfold all of us into a single, unified world. The geographical
imagination suggested by Readings 1A and 1B is one that draws
connections across great distances, yet also makes important
distinctions between the conditions of life of people in different
parts of the world. The issue of climate change prompts us to take
account of flows around the globe, but also impels us to think in
new ways about the countries or territories where most people live,

most of the time.

2.3 Divisions that matter: thinking
through territories
Without losing our focus on the planet as a whole, it is time now to
return to what Paani Laupepa from Tuvalu refers to as the ‘front
line’ of climate change: those islands that are particularly
vulnerable to rising sea level and associated climatic hazards
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(Lynas, 2003). It has often been said that low-lying coral islands
like Tuvalu or Kiribas in the Pacific Ocean, or the Maldives in the
Indian Ocean, are acting as a kind of early warning system for
global climate change. Sea level is expected to rise with even a
modest increase in global temperatures, both because of the
contribution of melting glacial ice to the world's oceans and
because water expands when its temperature rises.
As Conisbee and Simms (2003) remind us, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a sea level rise over this
century of somewhere between 9 and 88 cm. These figures seem
at once strangely precise and wildly divergent, and it is not
surprising that they provoke uncertainty and fear in the inhabitants
of low-lying islands. Moreover, islanders and coastal dwellers in
tropical regions face the prospect not only of gradually rising seas,

but of an increase in the incidence and intensity of cyclones along
with the temporary surges in sea level that accompany these
storms. In Tuvalu, as we can see in Figure 4, high tides can also
produce flooding.

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Figure 4 Tuvalu: flooding during a very high tide

As we saw from Reading 1A, the island republic of Tuvalu has
begun legal proceedings against some of the nation states it
considers especially responsible for generating the hazards
associated with anthropogenic climate change.

Activity 3
Now turn to Reading 1C (Reuters News Service, 2002a) entitled
Tiny Tuvalu sues United States over rising sea level’ and Reading
1D (Reuters News Service, 2002b) entitled Tuvalu seeks help in
US global warming lawsuit’. Both of the news items in the readings
emerged from the second Earth Summit, a gathering of
representatives of countries from around the world which
convened in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002 to pick up on
discussions about environmental issues in a worldwide context.
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